Barely Illegal: At Anand Jon rape trial, young models testify and defense argues over age of consent
Little women: Is 14 really the new 18?
Defense attorney Donald Marks mostly avoided hammering on the petite, otherworldly-looking Birgit, and focused on Gretchen’s stage-mother ambitions.
“You mean,” he asked Gretchen, “at 14 years old, your daughter was driving her career and not you?”
While not particularly relevant, it was a fair question, given that Gretchen had her daughter home-schooled since she was in sixth grade, and had told co-prosecutor Mara McIlvain how Birgit’s career as a model had been derailed by a cruel trick of nature — Birgit just wasn’t tall enough.
“Birgit is 5-foot-5,” Gretchen told McIlvain in a regretful voice. “She was trained to be 5-foot-7 so she could do runway — but she couldn’t quite make it.” Later in her testimony, Gretchen would break down and cry.
Birgit was an eerily detached contrast on the witness stand, a skinny 19-year-old blonde in a black off-the-shoulder top, black microskirt, tights and green nail polish, who spoke in a voice both girlish and metallic.
The pictures taken of her during Jon’s party show a younger, wide-eyed Birgit wearing vampy makeup and one of Jon’s creations, a black evening dress slit down the middle to the navel and barely hiding her small breasts. She symbolized, in those moments at L’Ermitage, the new age of consent. This week, Birgit D’s hard voice summarized what it was like to be 14, going on 18 that night during pilot season five years ago: “I was to walk around, not talk to anyone and just look pretty.”
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